🏚️ A Palestinian Man Weeps as Bulldozers Crush His Home in Jerusalem —This Is Ethnic Cleansing in Broad Daylight

One building, 11 families, and the West’s silence as Israel accelerates land theft across occupied Palestine

A Palestinian man sits on the ground weeping as Israeli bulldozers demolish a building in Silwan, occupied East Jerusalem—a building that was home to 11 Palestinian families. I don’t know his name, and I wish I did. If anyone does, please tell me so I can honor him properly. Because this isn’t just “a demolition.” This is ethnic cleansing in broad daylight, with full Western support. And the entire world sees it - and does nothing. Nothing at all.

Before I go any further, I want to ask you from the heart to become a member today. I keep this work free for the world—for readers in Gaza, for students in public schools, for families in deep poverty, for elders on fixed incomes—because a smaller circle of people who can afford it chooses to carry some of the cost. If that’s you, please click here to become a member and click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. Your support keeps this work free for them, and even for you when you can’t afford to pay.

Now let me put this video in Silwan next to the receipts.

On December 20th, The New York Times published a major investigation titled “Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank” by Michael D. Shear, Daniel Berehulak, Leanne Abraham, and Fatima AbdulKarim. Their reporting is blunt:

“Olive grove by olive grove, sheep pasture by sheep pasture, village by village, the idea of a Palestinian state is withering in the West Bank.”

That sentence matters because it tells the truth of what Palestinians have been saying for decades. This is not a “housing dispute.” It is not “administrative enforcement.” It is not a neutral “security” policy. It is a systematic effort to take Palestinian land and make Palestinian life untenable—piece by piece—until there is nothing left to negotiate.

Silwan is not in the West Bank the way Ramallah or Hebron are, but it is part of the same occupied Palestinian reality the world has spent decades pretending not to see. East Jerusalem is treated as “special” only so people can avoid saying the obvious: Palestinians are being removed from their homes and their neighborhoods to make room for a different future, for different people, under a different flag.

The Times describes a pattern that Palestinians know like muscle memory: armed settlers harass and attack villagers, often with soldiers nearby; “outposts” appear on hills; roads get cut through land; access gets blocked; homes get demolished; families get squeezed into smaller and smaller pockets until they finally leave. And then, over time, what began as an “illegal outpost” becomes a legalized settlement. What began as intimidation becomes paperwork. What began as violence becomes “policy.”

This is how you empty a village without putting “ethnic cleansing” on the letterhead.

The Times reports that in 2024 and 2025, Israelis built about 130 new outposts—more than the number built in the previous two decades—citing Peace Now, an Israeli group that tracks settlement expansion. They report that across the West Bank in 2025, settlers and the military razed more than 1,500 Palestinian structures, about double the annual average in the decade before the war. They report that settler attacks have reached the highest levels since the United Nations began keeping records, with one period averaging eight incidents per day. They describe closed military zones, new roadblocks, gates, fences, and orders that keep Palestinian farmers from reaching their own trees, their own grazing land, their own water.

And then they show you what those numbers feel like inside a human body—families sleeping in tents, guarding sheep at night, watching settlers lead herds through their olive groves and drink from their water supplies while the owners stand helpless. A seventy-year-old Palestinian farmer saying, “This is my home,” while settlers tell him, “Go away. Leave.”

That is exactly what you are watching in Silwan.

People will try to argue over vocabulary, because vocabulary is how the world avoids reality. They’ll say “displacement.” They’ll say “security measures.” They’ll say “permit issues.” They’ll say “complex.”

But when a man cries as bulldozers crush a building housing 11 families in occupied East Jerusalem, there is nothing complex about what is happening. They are removing Palestinians from Palestinian land. That’s the project.

The Times makes another point that matters: outposts are often illegal, but tolerated—and then later legalized. That means the law isn’t failing by accident. The law is being used the way an occupying power uses law: as a tool to bless what was taken by force.

And Israeli far-right leaders aren’t hiding their intent anymore. The Times quotes Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrichsaying: “Every town, every neighborhood, every housing unit… is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea,”referring to the two-state solution. That’s not a secret agenda. That’s a public announcement that the goal is to make a Palestinian state impossible.

So when people ask why Palestinians don’t believe in “peace talks,” remember this: you cannot negotiate your way out of a bulldozer. You cannot bargain your way out of settlers stealing your sheep, slashing your tents, cutting you off from your orchard, and then a soldier showing up with a paper that says your land is now a closed military zone.

This is why I keep saying Gaza and the West Bank are not separate stories. Gaza is the high-speed phase of the same project—mass slaughter and mass destruction under siege. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are the slow-motion phase—outposts, harassment, roadblocks, demolitions, expulsions, and legalized theft. Different tempo, same objective: remove Palestinians from Palestinian land.

And the West supports it. With weapons. With diplomatic cover. With the word “restraint” used like perfume sprayed over a crime scene. With a shrug that says: the rules don’t apply here.

That is why this video matters. It gives you the human face of what the spreadsheets and maps are trying to document: a man watching his family’s future get crushed into dust.

If this piece helped you see the pattern more clearly—and helped you feel the human cost—I’m asking you again to stand with me so I can keep telling the truth while others look away. Please click here to become a member and click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. This work stays free for the world, but it only stays alive if some of you decide to carry it.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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